A transit utopia?

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Kevin Fisher says to build a city from scratch in order to have an efficient road system for self-driving cars.

The grid would have no intersections because the east-west grid would pass under the north-south grid. When the cars switch directions they would use a ramp similar to a freeway. In fact the whole grid would work like a freeway with no stopping or stop lights. All the cars would travel the same rate of speed so merging would be effortless. You could go from point A to point B without ever stopping. Without the stop and go of normal travel the travel times would be greatly reduced. It combines the practical grid layout of city streets and the speed of freeways, giving you the best of both worlds. The amount of traffic allowed on the grid at any one time would be centrally controlled by computer. This would eliminate traffic jams and any slowing of travel times. The pricing to use the system would be dynamic, if you wanted to travel at a popular time you would pay more and you would pay less in times with less demand.

He suggests putting the grid underground. And it would be very expensive to do that under an existing city, so you have to build a new city.

I don’t think the “field of dreams” model works for creating a paradise of any sort, whether it pertains to transportation or for libertarian utopia.

18 thoughts on “A transit utopia?”

  1. The whole argument hinges on this, “Self driving cars are not safe around pedestrians.”

    Well, not with the self-driving cars and pedestrians we have *now*.

    Actually, what he seems to mean is not “are not [currently]” but something closer to “not in anywhere near the time it takes to build and successfully populate brand new cities”, which is as bold as it is unargued.

    Self-driving cars will get better, but also, it’s possible pedestrians can be made better, for example, if their smartphones communicate with nearby cars and instruct both car and man to stay away from likely collision events, so man-machine distancing similar to the apps already being rolled out for man-man distancing and track-and-trace.

    What’s more, those software approaches are immediately and cheaply scalable to all existing cities in the world.

    Lastly if the traffic is bad and his solution is dynamic congestion pricing, note that the wage part of Uber is already low, and if the major cost of a ride is a congestion charge, then it’s even lower, and there is less incentive to replace a cheap human with an expensively-developed innovation. So we could have higher speeds now with human drivers in a mostly-ride-sharing city, such that you would always be able to hail a ride quick, and get where you’re going quick. But the congestion charges would bite.

  2. From Where’s My Flying Car?:
    The greater Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area has an area nearly 3000 square miles. If you are on foot, about 5 of those are available to you. In a car, with present congestion that gives you an average speed of about 20 mph, travel theory tells us that you’ll have about 380 square miles from which to choose daily activities. A well-designed road system, allowing cars to get their normal effective point-to-point speed of 40, gives you 1500, half the total. A helicopter, or any low-latency VTOL with a travel speed of at least 100 knots, would give you access to essentially all 3000.

    I’ve never designed a city, but I’ve designed a number of processors and circuit boards. From a circuit designer’s point of view, actual cities are primitive, indeed antediluvian: there’s only one level of interconnect (with occasional jumpers). Even the Altair 8800 I built in my dorm room in the 70s had two levels on its processor board, and today’s typically have something like ten.
    [pictures]
    Norman Bel Geddes’ Futurama in 1939 depicted a city with multilevel interconnect and separate pedestrian levels. Today’s real-world single-level cities remind one of the primitive printed circuits of the 60s: half the vehicles are standing still at any given time.

    Even two levels in a city—one for north-south traffic, and one for east-west, say—would cut transit times in half. Heinlein’s 1938 utopia predicted, or perhaps prescribed, this. Norman Bel Geddes designed Futurama the same way. E. E. “Doc” Smith concurs, by implication: “Northport was not a metropolis, of course; but on the other hand it did not have metropolitan multi-tiered, one-way, non-intersecting streets.” (First Lensman) A separate level or levels for pedestrians, perhaps with Looking Backwards-type awnings when it rains, could make walking around town a quicker, safer,Remember how air travel had a rate of 0.05 deaths per billion km and driving 3.1? The corresponding figure for walking is 54.2. more pleasant experience, not having to spend the extra time waiting for traffic, or go the extra distance of crossing roadways. Given people’s revealed preferences, pedestrian levels should probably look more like shopping malls than the useless greenspace that looks so pretty in planning committee models (although greenery is valuable in other contexts; see below). On this point I turn out to be in complete agreement with Jane Jacobs; in fact I was quite surprised once I started reading her in depth just how much I did agree with her. [http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/i-knew-jane-jacobs-and-everything-urban-lefties-say-about-her-is-wrong ] She turns out to be one of those major original thinkers whose insights are misunderstood, oversimplified, and misapplied by “followers” who quickly migrate from the Baptist to the Bootlegger side of the equation.

    You have to compare the progress in manufacturing or electronics or software over the past half century with the state of the art in city design and operation to get a sense of just how stagnant the latter has been. Even the recent flurry of Utopia-building projects are still basically rows of boxes sitting on the dirt plus built-in wifi so the self-driving cars can talk to each other as they sit in automated traffic jams. Look at a brain, where most of the space is taken up by wiring. Look at a human body, where most of the space is taken up by tubes of one kind or another to move various stuff from one organ to another. Look at a processor chip, a circuit board, a chemical plant, the engine compartment in your car. Designing a city whose transportation infrastructure consists of the flat ground between the boxes is insane.

    Intelligently managed, with a Henry Adams Curve technology and economy, cities should be machines for facilitating commerce and social interaction. But well-designed cities, with integrated transportation such as “moving ways” and multi-level streets, are clearly among the high-energy, high-technology futures we were promised [Asimov, The Caves of Steel; Clarke, Against the Fall of Night; Heinlein, The Roads Must Roll ] but failed to achieve.

  3. The amount of traffic allowed on the grid at any one time would be centrally controlled by computer.
    —
    This is not the proper math. This problem is solved via congestion management between cars. The central computer will add cycles, stop and go as the cars attempt to keep local congestion with obeying a central computer.

    The issue with self driving cars is that they can use the current grid except for human drivers. Human drivers disequilibriate the system.

  4. All the cars would travel the same rate of speed so merging would be effortless.

    As I’m picturing it, if the cars are traveling at the same rate of speed, merging would be disastrous.

    • Bingo, gold star.
      The self driving car adapts to the local merge while the central computer spins on. The merging car thus has to ignore a set of central commands that other cars get, and that creates arbitrage and cycles.

  5. Building new cities has the additional advantage that you can solve education, healthcare and crime problems by leaving the poor, elderly and other undesirables in the old cities. Insofar as servants are needed they can commute in by rail. It will be glorious.

  7. One of the advantages of authentic representative democracy is that failure of Utopianism is quickly recognized and policy quickly evolves past childish top-down diktat. As a result Brazil is perhaps the world’s leader in urban planning :

    “In the last half century, the Brazilian state consolidated and then liquidated a modernist model for the production of urban space. According to this model, best crystallized in the construction of Brasília, the state produces urban space according to centralized master plans that are conceived as instruments of social change and economic development. The role of government is both to articulate these plans and to create the means for their realization. During the last two decades, however, a constellation of forces–including main elements of the state, business and industry, popular social movements, political parties, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)–rejected this centralized conception of state intervention. In its place, they substituted a notion of planning in which government does not produce space directly, but rather acts as a manager of localized and often private interests in the cityscape. Moreover, whereas the modernist model entails a concept of total design, by which planners impose solutions, like demigods, the new model considers that plans should both be based on and foster the exercise of democratic citizenship.”

    https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315249827/chapters/10.4324/9781315249827-21

  8. Presumably the new city would have Residential and Commercial buildings. Where do the cars stop for access to points R or C. Is the parking above ground or underground? Cars would have to enter or leave the traffic stream for such access, presumably at speeds slower than the moving traffic. Not as simple as it sounds.

  9. Edgar’s story of Brazil reminded me of what typically happens when urban designers construct concrete walkways in a park or a campus landscape or the like: over time you’ll see evidence that the pedestrians tend to take their preferred path, generally a more convenient path, between points A and B.
    The designers believe that they know where people will wish to go & how they’ll want to get there. The worn pathways in the grassy areas between walkways belie that confidence (conceit?)
    Cities have grown over time according to the uses and preferences of the people who live and work and make & raise families there. Future human-generated uses and preferences will never be fully anticipated by some designer or engineer, no matter how smart they may be. It’s a conceit to believe they can.

    • Many, many years ago, I went to a college that had a central “green”. During an architecture course, the professor informed us that the paths across the green “direct our minds and our feet”. Well, that was certainly true of the paths that connected one building to another. But a large student center had recently been built and no path led from its entrance. A dirt path had quickly been worn by students walking from the center to the dining hall. Their feet took the quickest route rather than the established paths.

    • An interesting experiment. Esp. in the hot lower 1/2 of Arizona. Being outside (“walking?”) in Phoenix is tough July-September there, except very early and very late. Metro Phoenix only exists because of the invention(?) of residential air conditioning (and more recently, patio misters), and because of water “imported” from the Salt & Verde Rivers, and from the Colorado River.

  11. I get where this is coming from but:
    1) Self-driving vehicle will be a form of reality but it still feels like 10 – 15 years away and this window has not shrunk a whole lot the last 5 years. Probably not time to plan for this until it is a true reality not just something that works in optimal driving conditions.

    2) It does seem like China has done a lot of building and they will come mentality has been fairly successful for last 20 – 30 years. However,

    1) This fast growth model will stop working at some point (manufacturing economies with mass urbanization always hit a roadblock)
    2) People and companies will move to the new city but it be a lot slower than anybody expects. The closest ‘New Urban’ city was Dallas in the S&L late 1980s when they went on a binge of office building developments which lead to offices moving to Texas over the last several decades.

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